An innovative new startup co-founded by a Jackson alum offers more than just a glimmer of hope in the uphill battle to combat climate change.
To combat climate change, removing carbon from the atmosphere is part of the solution — but where does it go? Enter Cella, a startup co-founded by Jackson alum Corey Pattison that is piloting an innovative technique that permanently stores carbon by turning it into rock.
The severity of the climate crisis demands novel solutions like Cella’s to significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions; in fact, the consequences of inaction are dire. Global temperatures are currently on track to rise to a level that would create extreme and irreversible climate effects in the coming decades.
To address the crisis, less reliance on fossil fuels and a greater shift to renewable energy is needed. However, questions remain about the expediency of this shift. In addition to aggressively cutting back emissions, billions of tons of existing carbon in the atmosphere must be removed and permanently stored by the middle of this century.
“The scale of the challenge is mind-boggling,” says Jackson alum Corey Pattison MA ’13.
Despite that, Pattison is attacking the challenge head-on. Looking for a career move “with impact and purpose,” he co-founded Cella, a startup that takes captured carbon and stores it securely in the Earth’s crust using an innovative mineralization process that turns carbon into rock. Cella partners with companies that have captured carbon — either directly from the atmosphere or in hard-to-abate sectors, like cement production — then charges them a fee to inject carbon underground and verify that it has been mineralized.
Since its founding in 2022, Cella has raised more than $3 million in seed funding and tech companies Shopify and Stripe have already purchased carbon removal credits. This funding has enabled Cella to begin a pilot program in Kenya that aims to prove the science behind the technique, in partnership with geologists and engineers. The company is also partnering with Octavia Carbon to build the first direct air capture plant in the Southern Hemisphere, which projects to trap and store 1,000 tons of carbon dioxide annually.
“Cella has developed a technology with the potential to lock gigatons of carbon underground safely and permanently,” says Caitlin Wale, principal at the London-based carbon removal venture capital fund Counteract. “Their approach makes use of waste resources promoting a circular economy, and engages local communities which reinforces their long-term commitment to solving issues surrounding the climate crisis.”
Empowered to 'make a bigger impact'
Kenya is a long way from rural Maine, where Pattison grew up, and Bates College, where he excelled in the classroom and on the football field — but he’s always been committed to blazing his own trail.
After completing his undergraduate studies in 2009, a Fulbright fellowship took him to Indonesia to conduct research on the impact of international aid on violent conflict. He then went to Gaza in 2010 to do further humanitarian work. The international experience led him to pursue graduate work at Yale; he enrolled in Jackson’s MA in global affairs program in 2011, drawn to its interdisciplinarity and flexible curriculum.
Corey Pattison
While at Yale, Pattison served as a teaching fellow for Emma Sky — then a Senior Fellow and now the founding director of the Yale International Leadership Center, part of the Jackson School. He credits her “support and empowerment” to pursue a career that he was passionate about, and he continues to lean on her mentorship and friendship,
“I’ve always been struck by Corey’s decency, his dedication to doing something meaningful, and his courage to try out new things,” says Sky.
At Jackson, Pattison also connected with Sati Rasuanto, a 2011 Yale World Fellow, who helped him secure an internship with The World Bank, where Pattison worked for six years. “Yale opens a lot of doors, but it also provides incredible mentors who give you the confidence to say, ‘I can try something new,’” says Pattison.
It was at The World Bank that Pattison’s vision for what would become Cella began to take shape. In 2018, he was working with The World Bank to raise money for climate mitigation and adaptation when the watershed United Nations’ Special Report on Global Warming was published. The report established the widely accepted 1.5-degree threshold for global temperature rise to prevent irreversible effects of climate change.
People and institutions across the world leapt into action, pouring money and effort into emissions reduction and climate mitigation. Working in this space at the time, Pattison took notice of the lack of funding for carbon removal and storage.
“There was a disconnect, a huge gaping need that scientists had just laid out,” he recalls. “So, I asked: ‘Is there a need here? Can I make a bigger impact here than continuing at a larger institution?’”
To Kenya—and beyond
In 2021, Pattison moved to Nairobi, Kenya, to work with the UN Environmental Programme. As luck would have it, Kenya is the home country of James Mwangi, a 2021 Yale World Fellow dedicated to sustainability efforts in his country. The two connected and were able to meet in New Haven, where Mwangi outlined his vision to build “an ecosystem of carbon removal” in Kenya, Pattison says.
Kenya is uniquely suited to host carbon removal technologies. More than 80% of the country’s electrical grid is powered by renewable energy sources, particularly its massive geothermal energy capabilities. That means, Pattison says, that the use of electricity for energy-intensive needs — like direct air capture — is not “a tricky trade-off” where power is generated by fossil fuels.
Kenya is also the perfect place to store carbon due to its abundance of basalt, a volcanic rock proven to permanently store carbon dioxide. “I got incredibly interested in carbon mineralization, first, because it was the initial step in developing the carbon removal ecosystem in Kenya,” says Pattison. “And then, as I got more involved, I quickly realized that there was a much broader problem of geologic carbon storage globally and that we could develop tools to solve it.”
With that, Pattison teamed up with Claire Nelson, a geochemist and postdoctoral research scientist at Columbia University, and leading geoscientists globally to found Cella. The company injects carbon dioxide deep into the ground, where it binds to calcium and magnesium in the basalt. This is a natural process that occurs over thousands of years, Pattison explains, but Cella’s process takes just a few years to store the carbon dioxide.
A similar pilot program was done about a decade ago in Iceland — another country flush with volcanic rock and geothermal energy — and in the United States. The abundance of basalts across the globe means that rapidly scaling up Cella’s operations is feasible, says Pattison, and that Cella has already gained interest from corporate partners in East Asia, Latin America, and North America.
“This technology is not just creating a more permanent, safer solution to carbon emissions,” says Pattison, “it’s creating opportunities and possibilities to rapidly scale up carbon storage globally.” In addition to markets like the U.S., where the Biden administration has begun funding carbon dioxide removal operations, Pattison says Cella will explore partnerships in rapidly industrializing countries where the majority of new emissions will come from.
“There’s a lot of concern right now about balancing economic development with achieving our climate targets; this isn’t a silver bullet where it comes to balancing those priorities —there isn’t one— but we feel like this technology can help,” he said.
Right now, Cella is still in its early stages, just over a year into operations. Pattison, the CEO, and Nelson manage a small staff and consult with a handful of science advisors.
“We’re doing it all ourselves right now,” Pattison says, including regular meetings with investors, industrial companies, and hiring engineers.
The new role is giving him hope for the future and the transformative potential of tackling climate change. While Kenya is far from one of the world’s biggest polluters, it’s committed to a greener future for the entire world — and Pattison is confident that larger emitters will soon buy in to Cella’s innovative plan.
“Carbon removal could become a trillion-dollar industry,” Pattison says. “But we’re in the early days and it’s going to have to grow extremely rapidly to demonstrate that it can be a cost-effective tool as the world tries to meet its climate goals.”
While daunting, he continues, “what’s encouraging are early efforts to be intentional about choices we make as individual companies and as an industry, like incentivizing investment and job creation in marginalized areas — to build something that reflects values of a movement that solves climate change, not one that caused it.”
